Monthly report: February 2019

February was a pretty good month. Or maybe it's just that I have a lot more reminders of how good it was.

Last month I determined to do something about my journalling, and it has worked, more or less. I can add items from my phone and from my computer, and I'm building the habit of doing so more often, not just at the end of the day. Now I can look at my diary.txt file and get a nice overview of what I've done. That is a useful antidote to the poison of thinking I haven't done anything. I can see that I had some nice walks for pleasure, that I did quite a bit of paid work, that editing podcasts might be getting a bit more efficient, that I had some minor disasters in bread-making, etc etc.

I can also see, and report here, that I started trying to use spaced repetition and flashcards, powered by the app Anki, in the ongoing attempt to improve my Italian. I like the idea of spaced repetition, and I far prefer Anki to, say DuoLingo, but I'm not sure I'm seeing any improvement yet. Are the sentences easier to remember? Yes. Does that translate into improved fluency? Not yet. I'm still not studying every single day, and might have to spend the big bucks on the mobile app to do that. I'm also wondering, is there something else I ought to try and learn.

Other things the daily diary helped me remember:

• Made some marmalade, three jars for me, three for an incapacitated friend who supplied the oranges.
• Moved email management from MailChimp to Buttondown. Some teething problems, for sure, but overall happy to have made the switch.
• Had a great weekend in Milan, around doing an interview for the podcast.
• Got invited to a very exciting event in Wales in June.
• Progressed on work to automatically record some information about podcasts I've listen ed to. This became more urgent when I discovered I simply could not remember where and when I had heard about a particular thing, and all my searching and ransacking meat memory came to naught.
• Stalled on recording other things I've watched or listen ed to.

Our Daily Bread

Fear of rejection utterly justified; the agent says publishers want something less bitty, "a biography of a commodity, like Kurlansky's Cod". In sales terms, I'll bet that's what they want. But it is not at all what I want to write. So, back to making self-publishing a reality, ASAP.

Exist.io

Steps this week are almost twice what they were a year ago. Not at all surprising, as back then most of my daily notes include some form of "knee shit". The knee has barely been a problem for the past 9 or 10 months now. Long may that continue. Overall, steps has been gently trending up, which I suspect owes more to the seasons than anything else. Not much else new of note.

Work

Logged 121 hours for the month and worked on 24 of the 28 days. Big jump in the time spent on Eat This Podcast. Can't be sure, but I think that's a combination of switching mailing list managers and having some rather complex editing to do.

Month	Total	Daily	Admin %	ETP %	Other %
02	121	6.0	32	42	26
01	95	5.4	39	13	48
10	100	4.2	41	34	25
09	131	6.5	45	23	32
08	185	8.0	14	85	1
07	68	5.25	25	63	12
06	96	5.75	34	9	57
05	151	6.0	36	20	44
04	159	7.5	29	29	40
03	152	7.0	20	10	70

Goals

Bad! Only 3 posts on this website. There's a continual tension between tinkering with the website and writing for the website, and this month tinkering has definitely got the upper hand. It has been super rewarding, and I hope to have something to show for it all very soon, but yes; could try harder.

Recorded Reading on 13 days, two more than in January. That's good.

Niggles

Currently, nothing major.

Final remarks

Life is still good.